Learning with Parents – June 2025

Learning with Parents

Learning with Parents is a tech-based charity that supports all families to have positive learning interactions together. We currently partner with over 170 primary schools across England with our Reading, Maths, English and Financial Literacy programmes. Using our platform, teachers set topics with fun, practical off-screen activities for their classes. These are designed to be accessible to all, with a particular focus on the most disadvantaged families.  Parents access activities on their phone or computer, try them together and then leave feedback and upload photos to show their teacher how they got on.

The Learning with Parents Financial Literacy programme

Learning with Parents partnered with IG group to develop a Financial Literacy programme for primary school children and their families, particularly those facing the greatest barriers.  The programme, which has been piloted with eight schools this year, is made up of 42 topics, six for each age group between Reception and Year 6. Each topic has a short, child-led video introducing the main ideas to families and suggesting 3 activities to do together.  So far 500 families have taken part and completed more than 2500 activities.

In June we will be visiting our pilot schools to speak to parents, children and teachers to evaluate the programme.  The photos and comments we’ve seen already through the platform and the conversations we’ve had with school leaders suggest it has been very positively received.

I enjoyed doing this activity. I now have a chart I will use to save my money for something I want to buy.

 We went to the market together and compared the prices with the money we had. We learned about paying with cards and cash.

 Hanna set up a café and served us a range of drinks. She charged her Dad and I a lot of money for her products and gave a bit of change with the receipt.

The Topics and Activities

The topics cover all the objectives of the Young Money curriculum.  They range from ‘Different ways to pay’ with the younger children to ‘Working out a budget’  or ‘Understanding Borrowing’ with the oldest.   The activities are a mixture of experiences, conversations, role play, creative activities and games. Popular activities during the pilot have included setting up play shops, making a choice in a real shop and interviewing family members about changes to money in their lifetimes.

Making it inclusive

Learning with Parents is committed to reducing the disadvantage gap in education. This gap is particularly stark in Financial Literacy. The financial skills of an average 15-year-old from a disadvantaged background were found to be similar to those of an 11-year-old from the most advantaged background (Anders, Jerrim and Macmillan 2022).

“Young people from disadvantaged backgrounds have less frequent money conversations with their parents and are less likely to be shown how money works.” (Anders, Jerrim and Macmillan 2022)

It is clearly harder for parents who are themselves struggling financially to support positive money habits in their children, but also vitally important.  Our activities are carefully designed and sensitively worded to reduce the risk of deterring families. They are also designed to be accessible on any budget. They aim to start those all-important conversations and help to build positive habits.

Many of our activities require no resources at all – they are conversations and games that can be done whenever families have a few minutes to spare.  We do include activities that involve spending real money as these are so powerful for learning but the budgets are at most a pound or two. The examples suggest purchases that families are likely to make anyway, such as snacks or meals.  All the images on the activities show ordinary families using whatever they have to hand and examples strive to be relatable to all – school fairs and trips to the park.

Using data

We use the data our platform collects to give us deep insights into how families engage with the programme.  Using integration with schools’ MIS systems, we can compare engagement between families who are eligible for pupil premium and those that aren’t. This allows us to track which activities are most popular and to continually improve our activities to make them ever more inclusive. We specifically recruit parents eligible for pupil premium for our focus groups to understand how they find the programme and to uncover any barriers to participation they may face.  We look forward  to sharing the findings of our evaluation in the Autumn.

For more information

If you’d like to find out more about Learning with Parents and their work, please get in touch on hello@learningwithparents.com or visit our website  https://learningwithparents.com/